Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

On the last night he had walked up to a red Firebird — it had been a weekend of Firebirds — outside a one-row apartment motel in Oro Grande and slid inside without checking the back. When he started on the ignition a sailor with a chain dog leash grabbed him from the back seat and strangled him against the headrest until he lost consciousness. Two men drove him in handcuffs out to the desert between Yermo and Daggett, helped him out into the middle of the highway and started kicking him until he fell on his face, then kicked him in the ribs with tennis shoes until he went out again. The sailor had been waiting the whole time and the other one had been watching out the motel window. The last thing he remembered was the sailor asking, “What in the world do you want to do a thing like this for, man? It’s a hard one. What do you want to rip us off for, man, we’re Vets. Don’t you know that? We’re Vets.” And they started kicking again.

He had lain on the warm asphalt watching the Firebird’s red taillights being sucked up in the dark tunnel below the dazzle of L.A. sixty miles west, and he thought that the sailor had been on the money, and that if he’d been stupid enough to put in for it, the sailor had every reason to kick the shit out of him and leave him in the desert to freeze without any shoes. When he had gotten down off the plane from Guam, the very first thing he’d asked himself, standing on the tarmac at Pendleton, feeling lucky to be alive, was what had he won or how was he better. And at that moment he couldn’t think of anything, though he figured an answer should’ve come to mind, a wrong answer at least, but not nothing — which was what he got. But in the middle of the night in the Mojave, he knew he’d at least won one thing, the right not ever to have to look up again and see taillights out in the cold channel darkness, the right not to be alone and busted up in no place he knew, with no place close to go.

When he got back it was Sunday morning, and Rae was asleep in the bedroom with the shades drawn. He sat on the edge of the bed and taped his ribs, turned on the radio, and made a call to Ronny Bliss in Michigan, somebody he’d known in high school and the service, and that he didn’t care anything about, but who had told him once lying in the sun on China Beach that his old man worked for the state and could get him a job doing something at Natural Resources that wouldn’t be hard to take and that would pay enough to live. It felt stupid at that moment to be going where he knew things instead of where you could find something you didn’t know, as if unfamiliarity had a magic familiarity didn’t. But his ribs hurt, blood was dry in his ear, and it seemed like the only thing that pulled the world together into an efficient place and had sense in it, and something that had clear sense was what he needed. It wasn’t even the place as much as the sense the place made that mattered.

Late in the afternoon, Rae said Michigan wasn’t a place she ever thought about going. She walked through the rooms in the house in her underwear and a purple T-shirt, smoking a joint, with sleep in her face. She said it was the wrong direction. She asked him why he didn’t want to go to Seattle since it was closer and the weather was nicer and she could get a good job with the Swinomish or the Tulalips or anybody up the coast. He sat on the bed counting money. She had gotten him into this and he had made a commitment without knowing it, and she was something he thought he ought to try to do without. He hadn’t told her about his Morgan money and didn’t see any reason to. She hadn’t said if she was going, and if the money wasn’t in it, the break could just be clean. Otherwise he might find himself in a ditch some morning in the cold, without his shoes and his head singing the way it had this morning, and just figure the only thing for him to do was to crawl back out and go home and let somebody take care of him and tell him it’s all right. In a while his ribs would quit hurting and his head stop singing, and he’d forget it. And that scared him. Wanting consolation was in you all the time, and you could get sucked up like those red lights in the night, and disappear altogether.

Rae was in the kitchen with the light on where he couldn’t see her. He had $180 in cash and some checks.

“Don’t you know progress runs the other way?” she said irritably. “You’re just backing off.”

“Let’s just don’t do that,” he said. “I’ve been west enough.” He wanted to get out of the basin by six o’clock. She could make up her mind by herself. She was just riding again anyway.

“What are you going to do if I don’t go? she said. She had walked into the dark living room, her long hair around her face. He stuck the folded bills in his shirt pocket. He had his bags in the car already. “You just going to fuck whores like you like to?”

“And do dope,” he said. He could hear her breathing.

“You wouldn’t want to ride with Sonny down to T. J.?” she said.

“I’d rather re-po Plymouths and get my face kicked again,” he said.

“I don’t understand what’s the matter with you,” Rae said. She stood in the door. “You act like everything turned against you. You want to get rid of me? ’Cause I can just disappear, if you do. You know that?” Her eyes were wide. “I’ll just disappear. You don’t have to go to Michigan or wherever in the hell it is out there.”

“You can go or stay,” he said. “I thought you liked that. I’m sorry I don’t have a big living room for you to ride in.” The room was dark, but the light from the bed lamp made her features severe.

“I’m afraid I’ll get off somewhere and you’ll make a place to live, and I won’t be able to, and it’ll make me miserable,” Rae said.

He walked in the kitchen, stood at the drainboard counting out cash on the rubber mat. “I’ll give you a hundred and twenty,” he said. “I need the rest of it.”

She stood in the bedroom door. “You shithead,” she said. “You don’t care what I’m afraid of. You just care what you’re afraid of, isn’t that right? That’s what conduct means, isn’t it?” She wasn’t crying yet.

“What do you want to do?” he said.

The dark behind her made her seem taller and frailer than she was. “Nothing’s permanent, right?” she said.

“Nothing yet,” he said. Light outside was the gun-metal color of first dark. He thought he could hear the ocean, but the ocean was too far away, though something always made him think he heard it.

“Do you love me?” she said. She had begun to cry. “You don’t like to say it, do you?” she said. “It scares you. You don’t want to need it.”

“I can take care of me,” he said.

“Then I don’t want to marry you,” she said angrily. “I don’t want to be tied to you if everything turns to shit out there. You understand?”

“That’s fine,” he said. “But if you want to go, you better come on.”

She left things in the house where they were.

Ahead of him a Pepsi truck had driven off the airport road and blundered onto its side. All the Pepsi bottles had spilled on the ground and two Mexicans without shirts were standing in the field drinking Pepsis, other bottles already stuck in their pockets and down their pants. They were drinking fast, turning the bottles straight up in the air, though the truck was on fire and there was a chance it might explode. In the rearview he saw back toward town the red flasher on a police bus. Both Mexicans seemed to see the flasher at the same time and started running suddenly out into the muddy field that ended on the dry Atoyac riverbed. They ran like children, their arms thrown out wildly, disappearing abruptly into the chase of the river. He made a wide turnout to avoid the truck, a brand new cab-over Mercedes with PEPSI stenciled backward in red script across the blunt nose. When he got beyond the cab he could see in the mirror the driver inside, his face sprouting blood and jammed up into the windshield as if he had been trying to escape through the front of the truck when something came from behind full force and smacked him. Rae didn’t need to see that. It would make her think the wrong thing, like the American girls gone out of the van in the morning. Everything got harder.